In 1980s and 1990s, the King Drew Medical Center was famous for offering teaching and cheap medical services to the residents of Loss Angles. After gaining its fame, the King Drew Medical Center then experienced leadership crisis where top management neglected their responsibilities and mismanaged the hospital.
The hospital earned a bad reputation following series of complains from patients that the healthcare professionals disregarded their roles leading to many preventable deaths.
Inspection carried out on the King Drew Medical Center gave shocking revelation that the hospital was operating under mismanagement that upheld provision of poor health care services. According to Beltran, “after five deaths blamed on negligence in the last year, the hospital is known to some as ‘Killer King’” (2011).
Due to the mismanagement, King Drew Medical Center earned a name ‘Killer King’ that scared away not only patients, but also medical students. Leadership failure at King Drew Medical Center has demonstrated that negligence, mismanagement, and political issues effectively destroy quality health care services.
Negligence of responsibility by the leadership was the cause of healthcare inefficiencies in the King Drew Medical Center. The top leadership ignored their responsibility of ensuring that health professionals adhered to professionals’ ethics. At many instances, nurses did not bother to attend to patients who needed emergency aid, doctors were reluctant to respond to emergencies, and prescription and administration of drugs were haphazardly.
“A March 3 federal report, prompted by a state complaint about the hospital pharmacy, found extensive problems with drug administration — failure to give the prescribed medicine, or giving the right medicine at the wrong times or dosage” (Beltran, 2011).
From the experience of King Drew Medical Center, it has become evident that negligence by the leadership to ensure that medical professionals in a health institution adhere to the code of ethics would lead into ignorance in provision of health care services. There was ignorance in the prescription, administration, and attention to special needs of the patients.
The leadership of King Drew Medical Center in conjunction with the Los Angeles County mismanaged the hospital. Bruni confesses that the need to weed out bad leaders “…degenerated into a witch-hunt, where you are guilty indefinitely, without due process, and yours is the onus of proof … drastically foreign outsiders were placed in positions of leadership…” (2006).
Placement of foreigners into leadership resulted into mismanagement of the available meager resources and recruitment of unqualified professionals.
Moreover, the hospital lacked enough funding and moral support because its leadership had poor relationship with the county. The county had the capacity to support the hospital if only there was a healthy relationship that provides for consultation in times of need.
Racial politics significantly marred effective leadership of the King Drew Medical Center as issues of leadership had race political overtones. According to Bruni, “the administrations of both hospital and university are predominantly black …there appears to have been a tendency to dance around the substantive issues at King/Drew because of racial politics.” (2006).
Since racial politics dominated the management of the hospital, the hospital had some difficulties in establishing corporate relationship with other hospitals thus remained isolated amidst tough challenges of poor leadership. Effective corporate relationship would have aided the management to come up with real time policies and solutions.
References
Beltran, R. (2011). Crisis Threatens Landmark Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Associated Press. Web.
Bruni, R. (2006). King Drew Medical Center: The Crisis, Challenge, and Response. National Society for Hispanic Professionals. Web.